Northwest Corner (18 page)

There’s nothing like new wrinkles in the game plan to make the crushing monotony of one’s existence too obvious to bear. Sam’s absence this morning feels hellish; like all negative ghosts, it casts a savage light over my solitary routine and, more generally, over the blind mole-rat behavior of my life.

You go to sleep and wake with a start time in your head—a sporting event on television, say, no more and no less. When that hour comes there will be, oh yes, paid announcers to tell you what’s going on and what to think, how fast the pitch or how rough the lie. The statistical odds of success or failure. The weekend morning, meanwhile,
stands between you and then. A pass-through zone, spray-coated and nonstick, designed to see you across the suburban tundra to the next nursing station, where if you’re lucky some noble, slobbering Saint Bernard might give you a neck barrel of brandy and revive the life that you never really wanted in the first place.

Years can go by like this, and have.

By late afternoon, the final pairing of the PGA tournament in Walla Walla stands on the seventeenth tee. The number of Buick ads I’ve visually consumed—with Tiger Woods driving a car he’d otherwise never be caught dead in—has reached double figures, outpacing, even, the number of beers I’ve drunk. I am deep in the heart of America’s living room, a place far more seductive than my own home. With their polite hushed voices, the announcers in their crisp network blazers are like priests murmuring words of absolution through the obscuring scrim of my very own confessional. Forgiveness is on the way, coo these pigeon voices, just for sitting through and buying it all, for being the good rehabilitated boy who refrains from pointing out the dead elephant in the room.

Well, it’s nice to think so, isn’t it? Even if you know that thinking it will be the end of you. And so the human circle comes round, or seems to. And you turn your terror’s attention for a minute—because, being for some reason still alive, you can’t not—out your open window to the high, unchecked voices of the neighborhood kids playing Transformers on Hacienda Street.

It takes me a fair while to realize that the grown man I hear blubbering into his hands is myself.

RUTH

S
HE MAKES HER MOTHER’S MEAT LOAF
, mashed potatoes, and thin coaster-size disks of grilled eggplant with extra-virgin olive oil, and they sit down to Sunday supper as if it’s old family times. The only missing ingredients are: (a) conversation, (b) appetites, (c) a bottle of good red wine, and (d) old family times. Add to that any sort of legitimate male authority figure—a species she last set eyes on in the Museum of Natural History in New York City, sometime around the first Gulf War.

“More meat loaf?” she asks her son.

“No, thanks.”

“It’s not very good. I forgot the salt.”

“I’m just not that hungry.”

A few seconds, then the scrape of his chair against the floor.

“Don’t get up.” Her unseemly plea at once too loud and too late.

Already standing, he looks down at her from his full height, which makes her feel like a dog begging for scraps. Her face grows warm. With no other options, she decides to double down.

“Please?”

He sighs, scratching the back of his head with a rough hand, and finally lowers himself back onto the chair.

“May I ask you a question, Sam?”

When in a position of doubt or anxiety, Ruth Margaret
, she suddenly remembers her ninth-grade English teacher admonishing her after an especially awkward class presentation,
it behooves you to speak politely and firmly, as though from a podium of formidable rectitude and calm wisdom
.

Sam offers up the least generous of ironic smiles. “Do I have a choice?”

“Why did you go to your father, of all people? Why didn’t you come to me? That’s one of the things I’m trying to understand.”

She sees the question, the basic concept, take him by surprise. She does not understand how this can be, after all the time he’s had to reflect. Yet he’s clearly caught off guard, his eyes glued to his hands—his default safety mode as long as he’s been sentient.

She waits. But his surprised, hiding silence is like a magic trick he’s performed right in front of her: she saw him enter the curtained box, but she won’t see him leave.

“All right,” she murmurs in defeat.

Her heart aches. This is not just a phrase. She picks up his plate, still filled with the bland food she cooked, and stacks it on top of her own and gets to her feet. Her bones are sixty, eighty years old. She is almost to the kitchen when his voice stops her:

“I felt like him.”

She turns around slowly. His eyes are on hers now, and they look too old and scared to be who she still believes he is.

PENNY

S
HE STANDS AT THE KITCHEN COUNTER
, early on a Sunday morning, her daughter still catacombed in sleep in the back of the house. Not in the poetic mood, no, or anything like that. Last night, somewhere around the witching hour, she understood that she wasn’t going to get much rest, and so it came to pass.

She pours herself another cup of coffee—then, thinking twice, dumps it back into the pot and pours herself a glass of fresh carrot juice instead. The juice, which she didn’t really want, remains undrunk.

Through the window above the sink she observes her street. Small, artificial houses like punctuation marks without words, framing nothing. There was that time, back in the sixties, when one of her poet heroes—the beautiful, angry one with the shepherd’s clothing and the godlike gaze, according to the old dust-jacket photos—simply stopped using punctuation at all. The words, he said, should be clear by themselves; commas and periods and capitalizations were distortions, cotton wool over the senses.

And, whether he was right or wrong, she would like to learn to live like that, without punctuation, hearing just the words themselves. But that is not how she seems to be living.

She puts her glass of juice on the counter.

Dwight’s car has come to a stop in front of her house. The top is down. Sitting in the passenger seat beside him is a black carry-on suitcase. There is a pause, almost a hiatus, while Penny studies him through the window, during which he remains with his hands on the steering wheel, his gaze level, as if he’s still driving, though the car is stopped.

He is still there when she opens the front door. Only then, and heavily, does he climb out and walk around to meet her on the grass.

He is, she thinks, perhaps not like other boyfriends or husbands, ex- or otherwise. He does not, for instance, say “Good morning,” or “How are you?” or “I’m so sorry for taking you for granted.”

He says, “I’ve got some hard things to tell you.”

And what surprises her is not the dramatic, if prosaic, opening, but how expected it is, finally, after so many untold secrets. An intuition, she suddenly realizes, that has been darkening her vision and her heart for weeks, keeping her from any hope of rest.

“I’m listening.”

“I served two and a half years in prison.” He takes in air through his nose and folds his arms tight across his chest, forcing his body still. “I ran over a little boy. Ten years old, knew my son at school. It was an accident, but then I drove away. The boy’s father witnessed it. He saw his son killed. He spent months trying to find me. And then, finally, he did.”

Dwight falls silent. He takes in more air. The sentences have come in quick, inward stabs of pain. He’s bleeding right in front of her.

“There’s another thing. Sam was asleep in the car. He woke up, but then I floored it. I told him we’d hit a dog. I lied to him every step of the way. The morning I turned myself in was the last time I saw him till two weeks ago.”

She stands staring at him. He has finally blown her away, her regular guy. Stunned nearly senseless by his confession, her dazed mind retreats; for a few strange moments, she becomes a satellite parked overhead, littering the clear blue sky, a Cyclops of sad, incredulous wonder at what human beings will do to each other.

Then she is grounded again. She finds Dwight back behind the wheel of his car. He has mistaken her silence for her final verdict, and he is already driving away.

DWIGHT

T
HE SUN IS GONE
by the time my plane lands at Kennedy. I grab a
grande
Starbucks, pick up my rental, and head north. In an hour I’m on Route 8 in Connecticut, following the disappearing tunnel of roadside lights.

Restless as a teenager, I keep pushing the radio’s seek button, landing finally on the Red Sox, that frequency hardwired into my gray matter at birth.

They’re into the seventh-inning stretch at Fenway by the time I hit Torrington. And in the gap where the game’s been going I find myself in an uncomfortable place, picking at some of the loose threads of my son’s narrative, his and mine: Sam busing himself to Torrington and back five days a week during his high-school years, so desperate is he to claw his way out of the small-town swamp of shame and disgrace and gossip that I left him mired in, to write himself a new identity at fourteen, so that there might be something to live for that doesn’t have the stain of his old man’s name attached to it.

The irony being that during this same period the old man is just a hop, skip, and a jump away in Hartford, scraping by on janitorial jobs and weekly manos a manos with his probation officer.

Until, one unhistoric day, with nothing else to hold or lose, the old man lights out for California on a Greyhound bus to (as they say) seek his fortune.

• • •

It’s past evening when I finally drive into Wyndham Falls. I’ve been traveling all day, and I’m hungry and thirsty for a hard drink and more than a little anxious about my intended plan of action.

I half circle the lightless oval green—not round, you understand, but oval, which is more historic (or so the residents explain it) and thus somehow more perfect—and then branch off toward Bow Mills. A lesser town, a hamlet. No one around tonight. Along the unlit roadsides the mailboxes are strange cranelike figures, totems, or maybe just boys waiting to be punished. They stand like sentries in the shadows, and I pass them one by one.

Twelve years since I’ve been back.

It all comes haunting, especially in the dark. The place called home is the one place you can drive into at night after a lifetime away, with no light to see by, and still know exactly where you are.

Down at the bottom of Larch Road, I slow the car almost to a stop. I’ve begun to sweat badly, and I power down my window to get some air. Somewhere nearby a dog is barking that old biblical warning
—intruder, intruder
—as Ruth’s mailbox appears in the spread of my headlights. On its sidepiece three ducks are flying. They are mallards, and it was Norris’s conceit to have them painted beneath his name.

I turn into the driveway, and the ducks disappear behind me. I switch off the engine, sit listening and watching. The dog has stopped barking.

Outwardly, the house hasn’t changed. The front porch, like a stage between shows, has the same neighborly presence and intent as when I built it almost twenty years ago. Behind and above it the double-paned windows are dark now, all but two: the kitchen, and Sam’s old room upstairs.

I get out of the car, closing the door softly.

I stand looking. Not trying to hide, but not trying to be seen yet, either. A coward’s way of coming back to a place that’s spit you out whole: you can make it through years of exile only to find in the end, with your feet again on the old bloody battlefield, that you’ll always
need a few minutes more to gather yourself. As if these last banal sights and sounds can somehow protect you against what you otherwise know.

Through the kitchen window I can see Ruth sitting at the table, a magazine open before her. Not reading but watching a small TV on the counter across the room. I can’t make out the show, just the flickering of colored light. Every so often she raises a mug to her lips and takes a sip of something. Herbal tea, probably.

And upstairs, in Sam’s old room, the shade is drawn. A white schoolhouse shade, pretty standard-issue, behind which, backlit like this, the smallest of human gestures might appear as the magnified Kabuki acts of a crazed giant. The kind of screen against which, when he was little and still in my care, on the rare occasion when I got home from work in time to put him to bed, I used to perform finger-puppet shows for his amusement, making him laugh out loud with every dumb rabbit shadow I could muster.

The extent of my limited parental know-how; the very best I could do at the time, I still try to believe.

No shadows tonight. He isn’t asleep, clearly, but what else he is or isn’t, I can’t see.

There are invited guests, and there are the other kind. Most every place I’ve ever been in my life I’ve had to force or connive my way. This is true about people as well as places. It’s true about Ruth, whom I had to court like some straight-up Jimmy Stewart before she would agree to move in with me. It’s true about Penny, whose phone number came my way only in return for the considered use of my employee discount, and whose sense of full-disclosure honesty I have undermined from the beginning, I now understand, with the persistent withholding of my own. It’s true about Somers, that rathole shitbox with its grated windows and acres of razor wire. It’s true about my son, whose early blind trust in me—the kind of belief so without the taint of preconceived deliberation that it must be evolutionary,
biological, if not something even higher and deeper—I repaid with breakage and betrayal, with abandonment, slamming the door of hope that his birth so miraculously opened.

It is human nature to want to get inside where it’s warm. To want not to be left outside the shelter, in the cold. It can be a rock cave or a tree house or a person so much better than you that your view of him or her can only ever be from your knees. Which is still preferable to someplace locked away or underground. All you know for sure is that you will keep trying to reach the warmth as long as you have strength, whatever the cold darkness you know about yourself, your own lack of deserving. Because if you are not taken in, if exile is as guaranteed as death, then you are kicked out and alone.